What Are Retargeting Ads?

Retargeting ads are served only to people who have already visited your website or those you already have a relationship with (for example, people on your mailing list).

Compare this to other types of ads, which typically just show to anyone you define on a certain website, or within a certain target demographic. In other words, you assume they might be interested in your material, but you’re not sure.

How Does Retargeting Work?

On most sites, 95% of visitors leave without buying or converting (like signing up for your email list).

Retargeting helps you win back these visitors — and turn them into customers, email subscribers, and more.

Diving into Noah’s tech talk time, retargeting works when someone visits your website and you have a retargeting cookie on your website. When your visitor open a new website with ads, the ad will pick up on the cookie and display a retargeted ad.

The key to retargeting is, it’s MUCH easier to advertise and sell to people who already like you vs. brand new customers.

Which are you more likely to buy?

The pair of shoes you searched for 10 times, read six reviews about, and then see a discount code if you purchase today

A random pair of shoes now your style, your size… and for the opposite gender

The key difference between retargeting and regular advertising is you already KNOW the customer is interested.

3 Types of Retargeting Ads

Retargeting ads can be used at all stages of your sales funnel.

To simplify things, there are three main types of retargeting ads I recommend running:

Content ads

Lead generation ads

Direct sale ads

1. Content Retargeting Ads

Content ads push viewers to a helpful article on your site. There’s no sale to be made, or sign-up for an email list as your end goal. A good us case for a content ad is if you just published a new blog post and you want to make sure past visitors don’t miss out.

2. Lead Generation Retargeting Ads

But for now… they still work pretty well. Today, content upgrades are an effective way to generate leads for your business.

To show you how AppSumo uses content upgrades, check out our free business idea cheat sheet ad below.

Lead generation ads can also be direct links to a free download form for a software trial, or even just a link to your email newsletter subscription page.

No matter how you aim to generate leads, the key is to create something of VALUE for your customer (and help them solve a problem) with your free product or software. 🔑

3. Direct Purchase Retargeting Ads

Direct purchase ads retarget users with the goal of bringing them back to your product purchase page. With these ads, you want to get people to click on your ad and take a next step through your funnel to purchase.

It can be best to target these ads at users you already have a fairly strong relationship with: for example, those on your mailing lists.

Even better, you can offer a percentage off coupon for users who finish their checkout. For example, if a user comes to your site, sees a product, and then abandons your site, you can serve them ads for a discount on the product.

Pixel-Based Retargeting vs. List-Based Retargeting

In order to successfully run retargeting campaigns, you first need some data to help you identify who you’re going to retarget. There are two main types of data used in retargeting campaigns:

Pixel-based

List-based

Pixel-Based Retargeting

Pixel retargeting tends to be the most common type of retargeting. Here’s how it works:

A user visits your website

A tracking pixel leaves a cookie in the user’s browser

When they leave your site, you can retarget ads at the using a retargeting platform like Google or Facebook

Anyone who goes to my email newsletter page will be automatically tagged with a retargeting pixel from Facebook. This way, I can serve my retargeted users on Facebook applicable ads.

One of the killer things about pixel-based retargeting is that once your campaign is set up, you can begin to remarket to someone literally as soon as they leave your website.

Top Tip: I’m currently using pixel-based retargeting to grow my email list and seeing incredible results!. When a reader visits OkDork I then retarget them with ads directing to my email newsletter page http://okdork.com/email-newsletter/. This is converting at ~ $1/sign up.

List-Based Retargeting

You can also create retargeting campaigns targeting people who are currently on your email list, or targeting email addresses of current customers.

Once you have a list of either your current customers or email subscribers, here’s how you specifically set up list-based retargeting works:

You upload a list of email addresses

You create an ad you’d like to target towards these users

The ad platform serve retargeting ads just to users who match the email addresses you uploaded

With an understanding of how to target your customers, the next step is understanding where to target your customers.

The 3 Most Popular Places for Retargeting on the Web

1. Facebook Retargeting

Using Facebook, you can set up retargeting ads to reach an audience of people who have visited your website.

For example, if you visited AppSumo in the past, you might have seen me making a weird face at you in the ad below.

Here’s a bonus tip: You can even retarget people who take action on your website.

For example, when a user signs up for a content upgrade on one of my articles (like this), I use my opt-in plugin Sumo to fire a Facebook tracking pixel on successful subscribe.

Here’s what this looks like in my website backend setup:

Specifically, the user is redirected to my Bonus page, and the Facebook pixel is fired. This gives me the opportunity to pitch subscribed readers special things on Facebook.

In your own business, you could use this as an opportunity to upsell or showcase additional products or services.

2. Google Display Network Remarketing

Google uses the term “remarketing” for their Display Network. This is very similar to retargeting on other platforms, like Facebook.

The big difference: Instead of your ad appearing on a specific site (like Facebook), your remarketing ads will appear on any sites that have Google’s Display Network configured.

It doesn’t matter if the site is a massive news site, your local taco shop, or even your own site. If you were on a website with Display Network remarketing, you might see an ad like the AppSumo one below.

Should you advertise to existing customers?

I want to “upsell” my OkDork email subscribers a new blog post or article

I want to grow an email list and get a visitor to subscribe

Retargeting current customers is uncommon — but I’ve seen results. Depending on the situation, I follow two philosophies about advertising to existing customers:

Upsell: In my experience, it’s MUCH easier to sell to a current customer who knows my brand than try to convince a new customer who I am. If I’m trying to pitch a new product or article to an already-existing customer, the cost per click (CPC) is very low, which saves me money and has strong results

Exclude: I don’t pitch to all my existing customers or readers. Often times, I’ll exclude them completely or exclude certain groups. After all, I don’t want to annoy my most loyal customers

When I do an upsell, I only show ads to people who have visited the site in the past 30 days. These customers are most receptive, and it means they’re most likely satisfied.

As you develop additional campaigns, Aaron Zakowki recommends creating different lists for customers so that can you can create specific and different messaging after they purchase.

My Step-By-Step Guide to Creating and Setting up Retargeting Ads

If I’m setting up retargeting in multiple systems, I like Perfect Audience. Their platform supports different types of retargeting campaigns from one, simple interface (including Facebook) which makes my life easier.

Similar to those of you who use Google Tag Manager as the one piece of code snippet for a bunch of different tools, Perfect Audience uses one pixel for multiple retargeting platforms so you only have to set it up once.

If you’re a beginner, it’s easiest (and least expensive) to focus on setting up retargeting ads directly within Facebook. Here’s how you get started.

Setting up a Retargeting Campaign on Facebook in 6 Steps

1. Set up Facebook Pixel

The first, and most important, step in kicking off a retargeting campaign on Facebook is installing the Facebook pixel on your site.

2. Head over to Facebook Ads manager

Once you’re in Ads Manager, click the dropdown in the top left of the nav (next to Adverts Manager) and select Audiences:

This is where you’ll be able to specify EXACTLY who you want to target.

3. Create Your Custom Audience

Once you’re in the Audiences tab, click the “Create Audiences” → “Custom Audience.”

Next, you need to select how you’d like to create your audience:

Facebook presents you with four options to create your audience. For this post, we’ll focus in on the “Website Traffic” option. (But if you’d perfect to create a list-based retargeting campaign, click on the Customer File option.)

On the next screen you have the option you have the choice five options to create your audience:

Anyone who visits your website

People who visit specific pages

People visiting specific web pages but not others

People who haven’t visited in a certain amount of time

Custom combination

I tend to find specific ads work best, so I choose to target people who have visited a specific web page with ads relevant to that page.

For example: I might target anyone who visits okdork.com/podcast with an advert for my latest episode. This is likely to drive many more clicks than an ad targeting everyone who has visited OkDork.

Once you’ve made your choice, click “Create Audience” and you’re good to go and create your ads.

4. Create Your Advert

Next, click the big green “Create Advert” in the top right corner of Facebook Ads Manager:

5. Choose Your Objective

Now, you need to choose one of Facebook’s 15 marketing objectives for ads:

The option you choose here will depend on the type of retargeting ad you’re looking to run:

Awareness = Content

Consideration = Lead generation

Direct Sales = Conversion

Choose the one which best suits your goal. If you’re just trying to push eyeballs to a blog post, pick awarness. If you want to push newsletter subscriptions, try consideration. And if you want to sell more of a product, pick conversion.

Next, give your campaign a name and create your advert.

Bonus: For a full guide to create incredible Facebook Ads (and the lessons I learned spending $3 mm on ads), click here.

6. Select Your Audience

With you advert all set up, it’s now time to choose the audience you’d like to target. You’ll want to select the audience you set up in Step 3.

To do this, click on the “Use saved audience” option and select the audience you just created:

7. Put Your Ads Live

Once you’ve got your audience set up, you’re all set you go.

Congrats! Your retargeting campaign is ready to rock 🙂

Spending Your First $100 on Retargeting Ads

If you’re new to Facebook Ads or just retargeting ads, I’d recommend spending your first $100 as follows:

$75 on Facebook Sidebar retargeting ads

$25 on one News Feed ad

An ad in a Facebook sidebar will get shown way more often versus a News Feed ad. Repetition and frequency are your best friends in retargeting, since it may take a user multiple times to see the ad before they finally click.

At AppSumo, Sidebar ads have worked well because they’re shown more often than News Feed ads. With retargeting it generally takes a decent number of impressions to finally get someone to click and take an action.

Next Steps for Retargeting Ads

Warning: People who are coming from retargeting DON’T buy right away. Otherwise they would have bought or taken action when they were on your site the first time.

Commit at least 30 days to trying retargeting to fully measure your results.

Some people get impatient and think retargeting isn’t effective after a week. Even if it isn’t effective, this is why I recommend you only spend $100 so you don’t lose too much money.

Retargeting can be powerful no matter what your marketing goals:

If you have a blog and want more subscribers, you can do retargeting

If you want to upsell new products, you can do retargeting

If you just want more readers for your content, you can do retargeting

Get started trying retargeting today. It could be one of the best channels you have for increasing your business.

I am advertising on Facebook and remarketing too. The cost per purchase on my remarketing ads are performing much better than my advertising campaigns to new audiences. For example CPP on remarketing is roughly $15 and CPP on new audiences is $30. Should I increase my budget on my remarketing until the CPP for both campaigns is equal? Or do you have a rule of thumb of the difference you like to keep the CPP of your new audiences campaigns and your remarketing campaigns?

Okay Dork! That is super stuff that you’re creating there. I think your advertisements for retargeting are top of the range and I would like to add a little comment if I may. First of all I think this type of work requires the expertise of the crème de la crème. I wouldn’t try and creates these marketing ads if I didn’t know what I was doing. There’s just too much that can go wrong so focus on seeking out the best companies to help you. Cost is always going to be an issue but I found that Treepodia is really effective and priced right. I would love to hear your feedback on this company if you’d like to take a look at them and their website to tell us what you think.

Great post. I'm wondering: If I drive some traffic to my website using a free method (like let's say forum posting) and I have Perfect Audience pixel installed on my site and ads setup to run, will those free visitors see my ads all over the Internet after they leave my site? Or, does someone have to click on a PAID ad first in order to be retargeted?

Thanks for an easy to understand intro to re-targeting. It helped break the mental gridlock I get into when trying to implement new (for me) technology. I have a question for you though. I downloaded your "10 Advanced Retargeting Strategies" and in it item #3 says "you can put your
retargeting pixel on other people's websites". Is this really possible? Can Perfect Audience do this?

Noah this is an amazing guide for facebook retargeting. Although I am now using facebook retargeting since a while and actually now I am good at it, getting huge ROI but one thing I want to share with you., the things you have shared here in your "blog post" I have paid much to learn these. You are a great man 🙂

I write books for Kindle. I've got some fiction and nonfiction stuff out there. Would retargeting ads be something that might produce a positive ROI in that market, or is retargeting something that works better with higher priced stuff. My books are typically only $2.99 with a $2 royalty on each one sold. Thoughts?

Thanks for the quick answer, Tyler. I had the same thought regarding raising the price. It seems like there is probably a threshold where items under a certain dollar amount would not see a positive ROI. Although, with Amazon and the way their sales rank works, even getting a slightly negative ROI initially could produce a long term positive ROI. Might be something to toy with.
When I have run FB ads in the past, I've gotten lots of clicks, but few sales. Retargeting might help finish off some of those, and if the price was close to break even, the sales rank benefit and subsequent visibility might be worth the effort.

Nice work Noah! I second the latter part of the article about establishing expectations as it pertains to direct revenue attributed to retargeting. I found that using some sort of hack or platform for tracking multi-click attribution to realize the value of campaigns was tremendously helpful. I was surprised at what the data suggested, and from that resulted a significant increase in user acquisition budget for retargeting.
Keep it coming Noah!

Hey dude, I like your stuff! I do have a question though that might raise some comments: why do I see from time to time the same ad(image ad usually) side by side on the same website? Why would Google show the same ad side by side? I mean one is enough by page.
And how long should the retargeting exist for an unique user? If the user has already seen the ad and didn't click, what makes one think he is going to click it?
I feel chased and I just go and clean my cookies!
Maybe that's me thinking as a marketer and not as an end user (I do like seeing different ads when I'm browsing). Comments are welcome! Thx

Probably because you are seeing Remarketing from different campaigns. Ex: one from Criteo and other from Google. This is also something very tricky, you need to find the best equation in terms of remarketing partners to avoid wasting money.

Once again, great article. What would you suggest, to start out advertising a website right away, or build some audience before spending money on ads? Until now I've grown all websites without ads, but I guess in this niche it's going to by tougher, that's why I am considering to buy some ads.

Noah, great post. I find myself buried in tips and tricks for getting new clients. The reason I love posts like this is because it is actionable and trackable!

Do you see value in building an online and social presence through blogging and tweeting before running these adds, or should this be a high priority action item for me. Even with a website no visitors.

Using targets #1 (people who visit but don't buy):
- we add a pixel/cookie to our site, so if they visit, but don't buy: we'll know
Q1 : how will you know if they don't buy (if I am using, for example, Gumroad, Selz or DPD cart?). You mention excluding pages -- what if the thank you page is inline (Gumroad Embed or Overlay)?

- we retarget/remarket to this people subsequently, on FB and wherever, with the aim of breeding familiarity: where should these retarget links go: back to the sales page?

Is that basically it?

Q2 (well, Q3 really): if you want to drive traffic to mailing list, you're simply driving them to a lead magnet page?

Amazing insights. You are one sharp cookie so good to read from you. I was thinking if you had gotten your .1% of facebook you probably wouldn't have had to work so hard and learn from your own experiences which you now share with the world. Frankly, I haven't read any of the facebook employees that cashed out but read your stuff which really helps me in running my own business. Thanks for doing what you are doing - much appreciated!

1) Frequency: As a consumer, I dont think I buy the "reinforcement" approach. You throw too many ads at me too frequently and I am frustated enough to "hide/block" the ad. As a n advertiser also, I have seen that frequency capping produces better results than running wild.

2) The CPM optimization that you talked about while good in theory I dont think works for real. With a lower CPM, the number of times my ad shows and the position where the ad shows reduces drastically. So no way I can expect to hit the same ROI goal. Would love to know if you did see the campaign ROI hit the target after decreasing the CPM

The OkDork isn't very identifiable (simple font, like many other logos) but your image is (atypical hair style and pink shirt). Do you think with some tweaks using your logo could be as effective as using your image in ads? Very nice post - thanks!

Question Noah ... if a user who is on the retargeting list comes back to the site NOT via a retargeting ad (such as direct or email) and they purchase, would this be considered a conversion as part of the retargeting campaign? Or do conversions only include those who clicked via the retargeting ad?

Scenario to explain... "Susie" is looking at flights on flights.com. She does not purchase right then. Ads retarget her. She comes back to the site 10 days later (via direct, not ad) and purchases. Many companies would attribute this to the retargeting campaign... but she would have booked regardless.

Hope that makes sense as you always misinterpret my questions. Thank you 🙂

Yes, the retargeting ads will take the credit based on the attribution. Most ad platforms follow the last-click model so if they clicked/saw your ad but converted organically within the conversion window, the retargeting campaign will take the credit.

The way to get around is to rely on analytics data instead of the ad platform data to evaluate the real impact of the campaign. Multi-channel attribution would give you a better picture of the conversion funnel and based on historical data as well as intution, you can define a custom attribution model

Attribution is super tricky. Perfect Audience does follow last-touch, but we also

1. Let you set an attribution modifier to set a % of click and view conversions you want to count

2. Let you adjust your conversion windows so you can rule out conversions where the touch happened too long ago for your tastes

3. Offer a kickass "Conversion Explorer" that lets you browse all the log level data we have about every single conversion we record for you. You can download this data and compare it alongside data from any other tools you might be using.

We feel that by giving marketers control and transparency, we can help them build the attribution model that works for them.

Completely agree Brad, attribution is a tricky beast. And my comment was by no means to highlight lack of a feature in PA 🙂 It is just how ad networks work and the onus is on the marketer to check the analytic to make better informed decisions.

In the case you describe, most analytics software like Google Analytics will not attribute the final sale to the retargeting ads because, the visit that resulted in the purchase was not from a banner click.

However, it was be wrong not to attribute value to the banner ads that the customer saw all over the web. No doubt this was a large contributing factor that assisted the sale. But due to the fact that there was no click on the retargeting ads, there is no way that any analytics software can track or value those ads.

You absolutely rock. This is an amazing tutorial. Remarketing and display network is our two best quick routes to market at the moment.

We have been battling with Boogle remarketing and their poxy tag. Run the campaign for a few days and then google pauses the campaign cause it can't see the remarketing tag anymore or all of a sudden you are missing custom params etc etc. As for Bings re-messaging service: Urgh.

We just tried this and got it up and running in under 20mins. Neat. Took us almost a day to setup Google the first time.

Awesome sauce....!
Thanks Noah.
Please expound on Cookie Retargetting on other peoples websites...this is EXTREMELY powerful since you can only target ACTION TAKETS (thank you pages, confirmation pages, download pages).
Are the cons/cpc still low/affordable? Thanks again!

Thanks Noah, great content. I'm new to paid advertising and this was a really useful article. I heard you on Lewis Howes podcast and was really impressed so signed up to your list, which has paid off with just this one piece of valuable content.

1st, this post is so informative and something we've been waiting to learn about. great that we're learning it from you. 2nd, bit amusing to see your face all over this post, esp. your funny expressions. 3rd, i hope you wrote this while having our coffee. LOL. thanks again, Noah!